Rebel Ridge Review

Jeremy Saulnier wrote, directed and edited it for Netflix, and it nearly fell apart: John Boyega left during the 2021 shoot, and filming stopped until Aaron Pierre took over the lead. Pierre plays Terry Richmond, a Marine veteran trained in close combat, who cycles into Shelby Springs, Louisiana, with $36,000 meant for his cousin's bail and a work truck, and loses it to two patrolmen and the law of civil forfeiture before he reaches the courthouse.

The film's argument is its procedure. Saulnier spends long stretches on bail deadlines, prison transfers and a ninety-day limit on keeping dashcam footage, and the detail makes the corruption feel ordinary rather than cinematic. Don Johnson plays the police chief with genial menace, AnnaSophia Robb is sharp as a junior clerk at the courthouse who starts reading the files, and Pierre holds the screen with almost nothing: a level voice and a calm the town keeps mistaking for weakness.

Terry fights to disarm, never to kill, and David Gallego shoots each takedown in clean, legible frames, so it lands as skill rather than carnage. At 131 minutes the middle sags under its explanations. Critics were close to unanimous, 95 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and it won the Emmy for outstanding television movie.